Bound for Glory (16 page)

He slammed his glass down and let his heart rate calm again. Then, slowly he got to his feet and went over to his safe, he dialled in the various codes and took out a simple box file, it was labelled with a single word – a name. He returned to his seat and draining his glass he regarded it for a moment. Then he opened it and began to look through its contents slowly and carefully, savouring the greatest, the most complicated piece of manipulation anyone in the arenas had ever attempted. Only he, the great Conor Brien, could have pulled so many strings and made so many little people jump to his invisible and inaudible commands. He spent the longest time just looking at a picture of a beautiful girl.

He looked at it until his vision clouded and he could see no more.

Chapter Eleven

Day after day, Anna trailed back to the barracks, exhausted, frequently scourged almost to the point where her skin was breaking, but feeling as though she was learning a trade and getting good at it. She put in hour after hour of choreographed feinting and parrying with the small shield and whip she would carry into melees. She toiled with the others under the lash as the whole squad hauled a telegraph pole up and down the training ground. She learned how to take a fall without hurting herself and learned the various wrestling holds. She had been fitted up for her boxing corset as well as one she wore for service in the playrooms. The boxing one had wicked little tines sewn into the inside so an opponent’s weighted fist brought explosions of pain that at first had taken her breath away, but when she found that the men liked to fuck well-marked girls at the end of a day’s training, she found that the pain simply triggered arousal and she was able to cope with it perfectly well. The pleasure she took in landing blows with her own weighted fists was another revelation to her, and her long reach made her good at it.

On the other hand her long legs made her unsuitable for chariot racing where a more sturdy build than hers was needed, likewise she was too big for dressage. But for single pony racing her build was ideal and the look of surprised pleasure on Scott Holroyd’s face at the time she clocked when he first made her race around the perimeter of the training ground stayed with her for a long time. That also meant she was singled out for pursuit running and in her first games would take to the arena completely on her own.

Her fellow slaves in the barracks had calmed down quite quickly after her return from the pits, and accepted her. She had no steady lover but gladly shared her bed overnight with whoever wanted to climb in. At first there was some friction due to the guards, fascinated by her celebrity, stopping off virtually every hour in the evenings and bending her over the foot of her bed and fucking her. But as the attraction had faded and she had become just one of the squad, that resentment had faded too.

Her growing admiration for the organisation of the stable had been fuelled by watching how the others she had been bought with fared. Poor Tracey suffered terribly to start with. She was overweight and the men put her on a brutal regime to cure her of that. From the corner of her eye during the days, Anna would see her staggering along outside the fence, driven on by relentless whipping – sometimes from two men – dragging behind her a net full of heavy rocks. At other times she could be seen struggling over the assault course and wallowing in the muddy parts as she tried to drag herself and her load free of the clinging ooze. The thick mud dripped from her breasts, hair and thighs as she waded waist deep under the unrelenting lashes. On good days she would just be run across country, shepherded by a man on horseback until she collapsed back on the training ground at Holroyd’s feet. Sometimes she had the energy to drag herself to his feet and kiss his shoes, wordlessly begging for mercy. But mostly she was just dragged away to one of the holding cells, until the next day when she would face the lash and the torments all over again.

But slowly a transformation had taken place. She wouldn’t be fully ready for this upcoming show, Anna heard the guards say, but she would make a good, solid whip dueller, log puller, chariot racer and probably a good wrestler too – eventually. And Anna could see it. She was shedding the pounds and a new girl was emerging, sleek and tough, but big breasted and still with womanly curves at hip and buttock. Somehow the men at the auction had seen the butterfly lurking within the caterpillar and had brought it out by simple but brutally efficient means. The day that Tracey at last joined the rest of the squad for training, she flashed Anna a smile of purest pride and ran her hands down over her newly smooth, sleek flanks.

Meanwhile the slender Asian girl had proved to be amazingly wiry and had made an impact at wrestling and boxing by being nimble and fast as well as strong, but principally she was to be employed as a dressage pony, where her neat frame and keen obedience made her ideal. Again, Anna was lost in admiration for the men who could assess female flesh so accurately.

The only rough patch for her since leaving the pits had been her anus. Any arena slave needed to be ‘three hole competent’ as Holroyd put it and Anna had never allowed anyone or anything up her back passage as a free woman. The whole idea had appalled her, even though she knew that most of her friends ‘took it up the arse’. Now, however, she was naked and legally owned and had no rights to her own body so it came as no surprise that after breakfast each day, she was made to bend over in front of all the others in her barracks and accept a butt plug. She had no choice but to wear it until the evening as two thin chains came off it; front and back, and these clipped onto a waist chain so there was no way it could be expelled by the day’s exertions.

As the days went on the plugs became bigger and bigger, until a day came when there was no plug but Holroyd put her into a wrestling ring with the girl she had fought with on her first day. This time the girl was able to put a full crotch hold on her; thumb in the arse and fingers in the vagina, if the hold was put on from the back, fingers in the arse and thumb in the vagina if it was put on from the front. Then the recipient was thrust up into the air and Anna screamed as her whole weight came down onto her two holes and then the girl clenched her fingers together and snatched them away. The floor of the ring came up to hit Anna like a sledgehammer as she instinctively clasped her hands at her groin and forgot to fall properly. It took her several more bouts before she was able to cope with receiving the ultimate girl-wrestling throw and finally put it on her opponent. The sense of triumph that she felt as she held another girl aloft, her fingers and thumb gripping the septum between rectum and vagina as she prepared to snatch her hand away and leave her to fall, was like nothing she had ever felt before. She hadn’t come at the time but in the barracks afterwards she had been insatiable.

At the end of each day, before they were allowed off the training ground, several girls were found to have been hanging back and not giving their all. Anna and all the girls knew that the charges were almost always trumped up. None of the girls wanted to give anything
but
their all. However, it was necessary that the stable drive home the lesson of complete ownership. Fairness didn’t come into it. They were property and had no say in how or why they were put to the whip – or in this case, the cane. Various girls’ numbers were called and the victims had to step to the front, turn their back to their sisters and bend over until they were gripping their ankles. Then a guard would step forwards with the dreaded cane and deliver however many strokes Holroyd decreed. The vicious swish and crack of the beating at first made Anna’s eyes water in sympathy, but as she became used to the harshness of her new life, she found herself straining to see how the girls’ buttocks swayed and rippled under the strokes. And she found the complete exposure of a girl’s genitals between her stretched taut thighs, very exciting. Inevitably she got her fair share and found to her relief that being bent over so submissively in front of the men and her sister-slaves, made the chip kick in with full force and she couldn’t rest until she had found a girl back in the barracks who would lick her out and finish what ten or fifteen with the cane had started. She had come a long way since Mercy had first caned her.

There was absolutely no contact with the outside world and with no speech either, Anna quickly fell into step with a world where her body was all that mattered and her mind virtually shut down except to register the full blast of the new orgasms, which she achieved daily, and revel in them. Sometimes some of the girls would be summoned in the evenings by a guard and taken to the main house where they would be fitted with stockings, high-heeled court shoes and a tightly boned corset. Then they would be taken across to one or other of the playrooms at the end of a leash clipped to their tongue rings. Anna was rather annoyed that by the time she was transported for her first show, she had yet to experience most of the racks and clamps and the more unusual items of equipment. It seemed that she got young lads who had saved up for weeks just to hire Anna Chatham for a shag. Usually it took four or five of them to afford her and although she was glad to service them in all three of her holes and she orgasmed freely, she wanted to be tested much more severely and they often seemed almost overcome at the thought of taking a whip to her. Sometimes it needed a guard to encourage them on to beat her.

So when Holroyd announced a pre-show lock down, which involved all the girls having their hands chained to their bedheads each night and guards supervising them every minute of every day to ensure there was no sex; she felt that she was ready. At a real Games she would be fully tested as the arena slave she now felt she was.

Eventually, one morning, two large trucks and a big horsebox pulled into the compound and from the bright-eyed look of her more experienced companions, Anna knew they were on their way to an arena at last. Each vehicle bore huge graphic depictions of a naked girl in the red and yellow chequered armbands of the Proteus stable.

They were lined up in their barracks, their hands were cuffed and clipped together behind them and a leather anklet was buckled onto each girl’s left ankle. A chain was looped through the steel ring on each anklet and on the command the long coffle shuffled and rattled its way out, up the ramp of one of the trucks and then they were made to sit on a long bench that ran down one side of the vehicle. Several of the guards made their way along the line leaning over each girl and clipping her cuffs to rings set behind them. Anna deliberately held her head high as a guard leaned over her. She could see the bulge in his jeans and as he leaned close to her she inhaled the scent of maleness from his body and dreamed of the carnal excesses that lay ahead of her.

Mark Cavanagh ran his hands through his hair and stared grimly at the folder on the desk before him. It had been three weeks since he had come into this very office one morning and found his friend and mentor of more than twenty years slumped across the desk with this file in his lifeless hands.

Conor Brien’s affairs had been labyrinthine. Mark thought he had known most of what he had been doing but it turned out he hadn’t known a tenth of the number of pies Conor had fingers in and it had taken an almost constant round of visits from lawyers and accountants for three weeks before he had begun to get a handle on things. In the meantime, Jan had taken the stable to Bahktar and won. Now the show back in Britain was looming large and he had been involved in the negotiations about that and knew they had to lose to the Dragons but had to make it look good. The payoff would be worth the temporary setback. He was okay with that and knew what Conor had intended and knew where the damning recording was held.

But now there was this file.

For once it wasn’t about corporate finance or the out and out financial piracy that was Conor’s normal method of operating. This concerned a girl and went much deeper. So much deeper that Mark hadn’t got a clue where to start or whether he ought to start at all. The file had been labelled with a girl’s name; ‘Anna’. Just the one word. It had seemed so simple compared to all the other things Mark had had to sort out that he had passed it over until now.

And now he felt as if a parcel bomb had just gone off in his face. The papers, certificates, hand written notes and letters, copies of e mails had built up a picture of an almost demented pursuit of revenge, and caught in the middle of it, right at the eye of the storm, was a girl.

Mark had dealt with submissive women and girls most of his life. He had traded them, trained them and played with them, but never had he formed any lasting relationship with any of them. Never had he felt empathy or sympathy with a single one of them.

Now he did. But he was rapidly coming to the conclusion that all he could do was watch and see how things panned out in the coming few weeks, it was too late to do much more than that. He would watch very closely though.

The seats around the slave pens at the East Angels’ arena rose in steep terraces on all four sides of each caged enclosure. There were eight pens in all and in each one of them a contest between slavegirls was underway. The noise from the crowds was almost at the pain threshold as they screamed encouragement. They would prefer the home team to win but ultimately all they wanted was a cruelly erotic and prolonged struggle.

In Anna’s ears the sound just merged into one huge roar that seemed to vibrate right inside her and send thrills of excitement coursing through her. The girl in front of her, now backing up against the mesh of the cage, was gorgeous. She was a blonde and the leather corset she wore nipped in her waist and set off her graceful hips. Her breasts were deliciously smooth, pale mounds, lovingly clasped by the corset’s cups, rippling liquidly as she moved. And Anna knew, without any undue conceit, that she too looked just as good. She risked a glance down at her own breasts, nestling against the wicked studs of the wonderfully evil garment.

She flexed her fingers around the long weights that were embedded in Velcro straps that encircled her fists and moved forwards again. She could see the fear in the blonde’s eyes. Their bout had only just started but Anna had got the best blows in, swinging punches that had thumped into the girl’s sides. The weights made the punches slow but solid, so the crowd could savour them better.

Thanking Holroyd for the long hours in the gym and out on the training ground, Anna let fly with a left right combination – her fists pistoning out straight ahead despite the weights. They got through the girl’s guard, the left took her in the midriff and the right landed square on the girl’s right breast. Anna watched her eyes flicker as she absorbed the pain and turned it into a kind of agonised pleasure that was just as dangerously debilitating when it came to winning or losing. Anna’s own eyes flicked up to the giant monitor screen that hung over the cage. In slow motion she watched the girl’s breast flatten and wobble back into shape.